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By ‘cultural complexity’, we mean all human and systemic processes involving both the creation of cultural contexts and the distribution of cultural information within and across communities. The reorganization of social and political groups due to these informational exchanges as well as the formation and adaptation of the conceptual maps that give shape to the symbolic networks of those communities are important targets in this area.
Culture is considered an evolving system that shares many of the features of natural complex systems, and as such, its study requires both the capacity to analyze large amount of data of different kinds and various provenances, the ability to track cultural information across space and time, and the conceptual and software tools to carry out multi-scale analysis on cultural events. We are interested in both the human takes on culture and the effects of cultural systems on the individual.
Technologies of cultures are the essential components that human groups use to organize, store, and communicate their collective knowledge across generations. Understanding how societies and individuals use these technologies to create meaning is one of the objectives of this research area. To this end, we analyze specific cases that represent turning points in cultural history. But we also investigate both the tools and institutions that are changing the way we organize and transfer our collective knowledge in today's global societies.
